Jupp Heynckes’ sparkling bonhomie envelopes Bayern Munich and extends as far
as Roberto Di Matteo, his touchline rival at the Allianz Arena. The Bayern
coach is an admirer of Chelsea’s caretaker manager and has called for him to
be confirmed in the post in a full-time capacity.

“He’s done a marvellous job and I can’t see why whether he wins or not would have consequences,” Heynckes said. “You need continuity. The atmosphere with the players, the harmony between players and coach, is very important. I don’t think there’s any argument against him continuing.”

“It seems he’s a very cool person who’s very much in control. Step by step, he’s improved contact with the players and created harmony.”

There is a lot of harmony on Heynckes’ training pitch, too. As he goes about his track-suited business preparing his team for their impending appointment with Chelsea, teasing Manuel Neuer, high-fiving Bastian Schweinsteiger, organising practice drills that endlessly involve getting the ball out to his flying wingers Arjen Robben and Franck Ribéry, the Munich head coach looks flushed with the success of it all.

But then he always has a healthy hue. His rosy complexion, which illuminates any touchline as if powered by light bulbs, long ago gifted him the nickname Osram.

“As a manager, you also have to have fun,” he says after the session has ended, his cheeks still flaring almost as red as a Munich shirt. “You have got to enjoy your work and be content. You have got to be satisfied. You have got to have an atmosphere where it is pleasant to work.”

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Heynckes is in his third spell as Munich head coach and clearly loves the place, its traditions, its heritage, its cultural position as the crucible of Bavarian regional pride.

He delights in the tactical challenge of taking on Chelsea after craftily outwitting Jose Mourinho’s Real Madrid in the semi-final. And he is particularly keen on his direct superiors.

At Bayern, he reports to the club president Uli Hoeness and vice-president Karlheinze Rumminigge, like him former German internationals. He enjoys the fact that after a peripatetic coaching career taking in more than 1,000 matches with 10 clubs in three countries, he is now back in Munich he answers only to football men.

“It is not just about them being football people – we really get on as friends,” he says. “We can have conversations when we don’t all agree with each other. We may come into the room with three opinions, but when we leave we only have one... mine.”

He roars with laughter at a gag lifted straight from the Brian Clough book of management speak. He may joke about it, but it makes his position somewhat different from that of his opposite number in Munich: for Roberto Di Matteo, the chain of command above him is furred up with second guessing and Chinese whispers, as intermediaries attempt to interpret the Chelsea owner’s wishes and intentions.

“Impossible,” he says of Di Matteo’s position. “It is difficult for those people who are not in the day-to-day contact to make decisions about the team, the club and the players. That is the terrain that is very different [between Chelsea and Bayern].

"A manager can never accept that somebody at the top can start influencing his decisions about the team. That sort of thing would have to stop. I would never have accepted it and I never have.

"People know my character here so nobody has ever tried it. I would not expect to have to explain my tactics. I have never done that. Anyhow, most of them [club owners] wouldn’t understand it.”

And Heynckes is a man who knows all about capricious club boards. In his one season in Madrid in 1998 he was let go eight days after guiding Real to Champions League success.

“You just have to be totally emotionless about it,” he says of managing a club where the sack is an integral part of the job description. “At Madrid it went without saying – every year they changed the manager.”

Heynckes has spent the past weeks since qualifying for the final plotting how to ruin Di Matteo’s moment. His training drills suggest he believes spreading the play wide is the best way to break through Chelsea’s defensive lines in a way Barcelona could not manage.

As for potential counter-attacks, he has told his players they will need to be far more alert than they were in the German FA Cup final last weekend, when they lost to Borussia Dortmund 5-2 in a show of defending he furiously described as “catastrophic”. But, whatever happens on the pitch on Saturday night he believes he will have one singular advantage over his rookie counterpart.

“This is our stadium, this is our home, this is ours,” he says of the Allianz Arena. “Chelsea have players [for whom] this is their last chance together to try to win the Champions League – Lampard, Drogba, Cech. But we have some players too.”

And of one thing we can be sure: win or lose, as he busily gesticulates from his technical area, Jupp Heynckes will light up the Champions League final.